The BIG list of food blogs

Almost all the active food blogs in May 2012. The best cooking blogs and greatest food blogs ranked in an almost complete list!
Forget "Exclusive" Top 10, Top 50 or Top 100 lists: this is an INCLUSIVE list of food and recipes blogs! I aim to list all of them. :-)

Also see:
→ the World Map of Food Blogs : a map that shows in which countries and cities the food blogs are located. There are certainly some near you!

Do you find this list of cooking related blogs interesting or useful? Please talk about it!

Creating this list of food blogs takes a lot of work. If you find it useful, I'm always very happy and grateful when someone talks about it on his or her blog or mention it on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks a lot in advance!
I will soon publish to thank all the persons who help me to make the list known, so let me know if you write about it!

How many active food blogs are there?

That's the question I have been looking for an answer to without success. Usually the lists of "the best food blogs" that are published from time to time are limited to the top 10, 50 or 100. The various blog directories are very incomplete and full
of blogs that have been long abandoned. So I decided to count them myself, and this page is the result of my search. It is to my knowledge the first almost exhaustive list of active food blogs in English.

How the list was created?

It's actually quite simple: I started from the list of food blogs that have been submitted to Very Good Recipes (you can submit yours for inclusion here). Then I followed all the links from their blogrolls.
For each of the link, I verified that the site was a blog, that it was written in English, that it was about cooking, food and recipes, and that it was active. I then followed all the links again to discover more and more food blogs.

When this process is repeated, the list of food blogs grows and grows, very rapidly at first, but as the blogosphere is not infinite, there comes a time when all the links go to sites that I have already visited. That's the moment when one knows
that the limits of the culinary blogosphere have been reached, that we can count the number of food blogs, and maybe rank them too!

It must take quite a long time to surf from blog to blog to visit them all?

I programmed a small robot to do that for me. It did take it quite a few days and nights though!

A robot? But what do robots know about food and cooking? All they are good at is slicing carrots and dicing onions!

It's true that robots are not perfect. I did my best to teach him English (being French, I'm quite happy I didn't have to teach him to pronounce it as well!) and some rudimentary notions of cooking so that he could distinguish food blogs from other blogs.

Of course it is very likely that the robot made a lot of errors (missing some food blogs and misidentifying other blogs). Please do let me know about them so that I can fix the errors and improve the algorithms I use.

How are the food blogs ranked?

For every blog, I indicate how many times it was linked from other food blogs. It is a measure of its popularity inside the food blogosphere.

How come that my blog or my favorite blog is not in the list?!

The first thing to check is that your blog has not been on vacation for the last 3 months. Only active blogs with recent posts are listed.

If you blog in English but also in another language too, I might have misidentified the language. Contact me so that I can fix it.

Only blogs that talk mostly about food are listed. If you blog about food but also a lot of other topics, it may be a reason why your blog is not listed.

If you have a relatively new blog with few links to it, the robot might have been unable to discover it.

It is possible that there was a technical problem when the robot visited the site (site unreachable, in maintenance etc.)

The best way to be certain to be in the list is to submit your blog on Very Good Recipes: that's the list of blogs I use as a seed to discover all the others. You can submit your blog here.

In all cases, if you think a blog is missing, or that some blogs are not cooking blogs and should not be there, please send me an e-mail along with the urls.